Love lingers in memories of past embraces, in y(our) shared moments of agony and affection. The pains of past love form bruises–tender and swollen kinks that excite and sting. 

Sophia Stevenson’s MFA thesis exhibition is personal, as is our relationship (she is a close friend and fellow graduate student at USC Roski). Guided by a queer feminist framework, Stevenson considers stories of longing and desire told through queer literature and lesbian pulp fiction as they relate to her own queer yearning and ongoing process of self-discovery. She examines how these stories disrupt politics of pleasure, power, and gender and how they forge connections with communities of queer kinship and healing. Acknowledging her tumultuous experience growing up queer in the conservative American South, Stevenson examines intimate periods of loss, illness, and self-preservation. Moments of strength and precarity push and pull in acts of radical vulnerability as she traverses the remnants of past relationships. In the film ​​Sweetbitter the artist gags, spits, and chokes as she devours mounds of salt, repeating the action of gaining and losing control, and feeling attraction and repulsion. These power dynamics and dualistic instincts can be traced throughout her performance and material practice. A wall of velvet lilac curtains guides you to a pillar of salt with a single-channel video projected onto the glistening surface depicting the artist running ahead and abruptly stopping to gaze back. Stevenson’s interest in salt is a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s iconic lesbian novel, The Price of Salt from 1952. Shot at the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah, the artist projects her hopes and desires for radical queer futures onto the salt-encrusted horizon. 

Stevenson presents notions of desire that are vast and fleeting. Flirting with the edges of queer horizons, she imagines radical queer futures, a perpetual sunrise where sexuality and love know no limits or borders. Looking back as a way to look forward, Stevenson whispers tender stories for queer ears. 

Roski Mateo Gallery
1262 Palmetto Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
On view through April 30, 2022